Packard Bioscience Receives Inkjet Printing Patent Enabling the Production of Protein Chips

Meriden, Connecticut, October 13, 2000 -- Packard BioScience Company (Nasdaq: PBSC) announced today the issuance of U.S. Patent 6,112,605, entitled "Method for Dispensing and Determining a Microvolume of Sample Liquid." The 31 claims of this patent cover methods and devices to enable low-cost, industrial-scale manufacturing of protein and DNA microarrays by using robot-controlled, inkjet-style printing technology. This technology has been pioneered by Packard for the production of biochips, which are microarrays containing microspots of biomolecules such as DNA, proteins and cells. This new patent provides broad and fundamental coverage encompassing accurate dispensing of multiple droplets in a single microspot of a microarray, hence making possible the manufacture of high-quality protein chips where high sensitivity and assay specificity are key requirements.

While current methods for microarray production are limited to the synthesis or spotting of DNA or gene fragments, it is expected that Packard's proprietary inkjet printing technology will remove many of the technical obstacles associated with the production of high-quality protein chips. Such protein chips are considered essential tools for post-genomic research. They are complementary to DNA and gene chips, and it is generally anticipated that the ability to analyze proteins on chips will lead to the ubiquitous use of biochips.

"The large-scale experimentation requirements of the post-genome era are causing a convergence of biology and nanotechnology. Biochips are expected to have wide commercial applications in areas such as drug discovery, diagnostics and eventually personalized medicine, and we are pleased that the Patent Office acknowledges our pioneering efforts in this fast-growing field," states Emery G. Olcott, President and CEO of Packard BioScience. "In addition to enabling the production of high-quality DNA and protein chips, our inkjet printing technology will be sold in combination with our proprietary biochip substrates, currently under development, and our newly acquired line of laser scanning equipment. Our goal is to package these proprietary technologies to the commercial market to significantly expand the research community's access to biochips and microarrays."

Biochips containing microarrays of genomic and proteomic information promise to be one of the most important research tools in the post-genome era. They are one of the very few platforms that support the highly parallel analysis needed to exploit the explosive growth in genetic information resulting from the sequencing of the human genome. Initial applications will be in drug discovery, pharmacology and clinical research. The emerging field of pharmacogenomics, which explores an individual's genetically determined response to drugs, is particularly expected to benefit from biochip analysis, eventually leading to mass diagnostic and personalized medicine applications. Other biochip applications will include forensics, toxicology and epidemiological research.

Packard BioScience Company is a leading global developer, manufacturer and marketer of instruments and related consumables and services for use in the life sciences research industries. The Company is primarily focused on the rapidly growing areas of drug discovery, genomics and biochip analysis and is continuing to develop integrated platforms based on a wide range of technologies and instrumentation. These platforms are designed to support the industrialization of drug discovery by bringing the benefits of miniaturization, automation and ultra-high throughput analysis to these areas. Packard's experience in working in more than 60 countries with market leading customers has allowed the Company to establish a worldwide leadership position in many of its primary product categories, with well-recognized brand names and a reputation for high quality, reliable instruments. Recently, Packard has focused on the development of enabling biochip technologies, and has started to exploit the commercialization of its pioneering biochip production patents through both direct sales of biochip products as well as through partnership agreements with Motorola, Inc. for gene chip applications, ACLARA BioSciences Company for lab-on-a-chip markets and Oxford GlycoSciences plc for protein chips.

Provided by: Packard BioChip Technologies